


Noor

by eudaimon



Series: Our Lives Apart [14]
Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-12
Updated: 2012-07-12
Packaged: 2017-11-09 20:32:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/458082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Half Indian, Half American and born in Russia, Noor Inayat Khan served as a British spy stationed<br/>in France during the second world war. She was captured by the Nazis in October, 1943 and executed at<br/>Dachau Concentration Camp on 13th September, 1944.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Noor

**Author's Note:**

> Half Indian, Half American and born in Russia, Noor Inayat Khan served as a British spy stationed  
> in France during the second world war. She was captured by the Nazis in October, 1943 and executed at  
> Dachau Concentration Camp on 13th September, 1944.

In the dark, in the cell, she tries to remember walking down a street in London or Paris, the leaves in the trees just starting to turn to brown and gold, the wind chasing them around the toes of her shoes, sticking them in her long hair. There isn't even a window in the cell: no glimpse here of that little tent of blue. She used to love that poem. Before, she tore one of her fingernails clean away and it's been slow to grow back. She teases at the sore flesh with her teeth. Every stab of sensation reminds her: that she's still alive, yes, but more than that. It reminds her that when they came for her, when they finally caught up with her, Noor Inayat Khan remembered how to fight.

She’s very proud of that.

She's been in the cell for a long time. Winter must have been and gone while she’s been still here. The snow must have melted by now. Before he came to live in Moscow, there must have been a time when her Indian father was entirely without knowledge of such things as snow. Her American mother was western and warm, no frost on her low-lying mountains. He came to marry Ora Baker, and she was a desert composed only of red dust. The palms of Noor’s hands are stained red, scuffed from falling against concrete when pushed. Her knuckles are split and painful. She keeps reopening old wounds. When they came for her she fought as fiercely as a creature already dying. She fought desperately, feet and fists and teeth and they took her anyway. Somewhere, her gentle father turned his face away. 

There’s so much now that she can no longer clearly remember. Like, she used to write children’s books, didn’t she? Somebody did that. She sat in the sun-room in her mother’s house and wrote poetry on thick cream paper in blue-black Indian ink. That had been her, that dreamy girl with her poems and the smell of the flowers on the windowsill, that girl who’d never considered fighting, and then had remembered how to fight for her life?

That must have been her.  
Once upon a time the world was very changed and everyone in it was very changed too. 

*

She has trouble with the details of faces. It’s been difficult to keep track of how long they’ve kept her in the dark like this. There’s so little routine to anything they do; they feed her when it occurs to them and, usually, it’s a long time from one mouthful to another. More often than not, the ugly clang of the metal hatch at the bottom of the door is what wakes her. She eats bread, soup that tastes of nothing but ash. She slobbers water from a shallow metal bowl like a dog might but most of the time she can remember her other, human face. Which means that they haven’t won yet.   
She’s used to the lack of routine, somehow, so it doesn’t bother her as much as it should. Her parents were always nomadic. They loved the world too much to stay still in it. She remembers the moving. The faces, though. She has such a hard time with the faces. It's been so long since she looked anybody in the eye.

_“Will you remember me always, cherie?”_

Joe had asked her that, propped up on one elbow in a bed under the eaves. Then, she had known his face by heart, but now she can only conjure up a collection of features which might not even belong to him; dark hooded eyes…a nose, a little crooked, smudged sideways by a collision on the soccer field and saving him from looking too much like a matinee idol…warm broad hands and soft dark hair which was so different from her own, which was coarse, Indian, black. She remembers smiling at him, dragging the sheet higher over one bare breast to block the draft from the little bathroom. She remembers tiles the green of sea-glass on the walls and floor, cracked in front of the lavatory. Even then, even before all of the moving started, she knew that she didn’t have forever to promise him, not anymore. She’d kissed him. His lips had tasted of a little wine and a little tobacco, spit and a hint of her own dark, secret places. Her body was a country like the one that her father was born in. She had been filled to the brim with secrets.

“I’ll remember you for as long as I can,” she’d said. That was what she’d promised. That was what she’d had to give him, at the time.

*

She’d been moving her whole life by then, so it wasn’t so hard to keep going for King and Country, doing what was right in the face of that war. Her parents had liked to move. Though she was born there, she doesn’t remember Moscow; she knows it only by the elaborate enamelled jewellery her mother liked to wear for parties and by the kind words of her gentle father. Bloomsbury, though, she knows well, in the part of her heart that will be forever six years old: the trees and the squares, the walk past the tall houses with her hand in Nanny’s to the British Museum with its great wide steps and space to spread a picnic blanket on the grass. Why hadn’t her parents loved it there as much as she had? Maybe it was the house in Suresnes that had tempted them, a gift, with paintings of trees in bright colours and gold leaf in each alcove? As that child, that transported girl, her favourite thing in the world had been that short train ride into Paris with her cheek leaning against her father’s shoulder. Often, they’d eaten lunch in the park beneath the Eiffel tower and not come home again until it was getting dark.

Her father had died in 1927. She’d been thirteen years old when the world had ended over night and started again in the morning, subtly different, stranger.

These things came back to her while sitting in classrooms and chewing on pencils, ribs aching from bruises earned crawling over Scottish mountains on her belly like a snake, or like something trying to learn how to become invisible. She’d become Nora by then, plain Nora Baker (not a million miles away from Ora Baker, who married Hazrat Inayat and made their Khan babies together). It was only a step backwards. Nora learned those things and so Noor could keep her heart for God, just as she had been taught. It was Nora who was taught to shoot from her hip, double tap method, just to be sure. Two shots, just to be safe. It was Nora who learned to blow things up and became skilled at reading maps that she came to know so well that they might as well have been tattooed onto the insides of her eyelids. They gave her a dress lined with maps painted onto parachute silk, black, and fitted like a second skin. While Nora was committing the Morse alphabet to memory, Noor had found the heel of her shoe tapping out one message over and over again.

  
**… --- … --- .-. .-. -.-- -.. .- -.. -.. -.-- … --- … --- .-. .-. -.--**   


*

They ask her the same questions over and over, like one day they hope to catch her unawares and, on that day, the answers will be the ones that they want. They're always the same though; she keeps her lies. Whatever these bastards want from her, she’s going to make them take. After they’ve gone, when her face stings and her teeth ache and the piss runs down the inside of her thighs, she likes to think that even Allah, with all His love and infinite compassion, must hate a Fascist.

There’s this little one that she particularly loathes. He shines bright lights into her eyes (wouldn’t do to let her see a human face clearly, not even her own). She can smell the oil that he must use to plaster his hair flat against his skull. She pities the woman who has to lie with him, which brings her back to Joe, and the way that his hair would stand up, crazy, when he bent to kiss her. She can get lost in memories like that, concentrating on clearly remembering details like how Joe’s skin had been almost as dark as hers, in a different shade and how he'd spoken French to her in the middle of the night. A whole nation of people had been speaking that same language and yet, somehow, it had always felt like a secret between her and him. She barely even hears the questions anymore. Sometimes, she doesn’t hear anything until she wakes up in the dark, her mouth still bleeding and the next time that they feed her she has to be careful about how she chews. She doesn't mind. If her mouth hurts, it’s another reason not to answer their questions. She has found that thinking of everything as a circle is somehow comforting.

She can't recall the last time she heard music. She can barely remember the comforting weight of the harp resting back against her, the soft press of piano keys under her fingertips. When they locked her up, what she found was this; that each chain link had a particular sound, a note; that each hurting part of her hummed at a different pitch; that, in loss, there’s singing. Each link was a note. Each note was something that she could take back and have and remember. It wasn’t much of a song, but it was hers. A song for her funeral, perhaps? A hymn. When her father died, they laid him carefully in a hole in the ground but they should have wrapped him in strips of white linen, burned incense and set the whole pyre alight. It would have been the cleanest thing in the world. Sitting there in her own shit, she never would have expected to find music, which just goes to show….

She loses her train of thought.

*

In England there had been jump training; one one thousand two one thousand, plummeting towards the ground beneath a canopy, white like a wedding skirt. Didn’t it make more sense to see white as a mourning colour, empty as loss? The pounding in her ears had been the sound of her own heart. It wasn’t natural, not nearly, which is probably why it was so exciting, at the time.

There was no jump into France in the end. Just a landing, in the dead of night - a little spluttering plane, a trench-coat pulled in tight around her, not thick enough to keep out the chill. She'd combed her hair with her fingers and twisted it back, tight and severe. Nora Baker hadn't had anything soft about her, because a soft spot was a vulnerable spot was a place where she could be killed. She wound herself into a tight knot, into a circle, into a fist. She had another name by then, to go with Ora and Nora and Noor. She was Madeline, the Nurse. That was what she would call herself in her own radio broadcasts, cryptonamed. She met Henri there, Henri Dericourt; now she remembers his face only as pleasing, with his dark hair ruffled by the night wind. Henri had been a pilot once, so he knew the agony and the terror and the joy of falling.

She hadn't quite realised, then, what a way she had yet to fall. Had any of them? They had been glowing with their heroism. It never occurred to them how easy it is to snuff out a flame, like candles on a birthday cake. She wonders if anyone remembered to make a wish? How could they have known?

She'd had a job that she'd been trained to do, then. She had purpose and yet another name: Jeanne-Marie Regnier. She collected information in notebook after notebook, slept during the day and made her broadcasts at night. London, this is Madeline calling. She'd done her best. There had been safe houses, grim French faces which never smiled. Noor hadn't felt much like smiling either. She wished she had done; maybe then she remember how to now. She tries, but the movements are complicated and her muscles have forgotten. 

Daily, towards the end, they'd offered her the chance to go home. Paulette and Alice (she'd never known their real names) had already been taken by the _Sicherheitsdienst_. Nora’s duty was done. She could have gone home and saved herself but she'd thought of all the young men in Europe, the British, the Americans, the Russians. She had owed something to all of them, hadn't she? Each of those boys had something to do with one of the places that she’d sprung from. She loved every single one of them

So she'd stayed.

The moves became more frequent. It had begun to feel more like running than merely staying hid. Sometimes Joe had been there but, more often, not. She'd been alone in narrow beds. She'd whispered prayers only half remembered from her childhood. At night, in the dark, she'd flipped through her notebooks, her collection of secret, useful things. She shouldn't have written things down. It was contrary to every bit of her training. She'd done it anyway. She hadn't trusted herself to remember accurately.

It seems almost funny now. She'd laugh, but laughing went the same way as smiling. It's another thing they beat out of her memory. If she concentrates very hard, she can remember somebody laughing, and she thinks that it might be Joe.

*

There was a tear in her skirt and she was stitching it. She was sitting with her head bent, one candle burning. It had hurt her eyes, sewing like that. It was easier to move safely at night. Which didn't stop them coming while the candle-flames were burning. She was on her way to becoming a nocturnal creature, but she wasn't quite there yet. She still squinted in bad light. 

A needle wasn't much of a weapon. There wasn't much weight in a spool of thread. She'd made her hands into claws. She'd kicked the shoes off her feet. She doesn't remember it clearly, how she fought. Afterwards, she took account of bloodied knuckles and bruised skin. One nail torn completely off, the pain much bigger, much deeper than it should have been. Somebody had been screaming, a hurting, throbbing screaming like a hunted fox or a creature bleeding out onto the snow. It had been weeks before she realised that it must have been her that had made that sound. In training, they had thought she was too gentle, too meek. Even she had never suspected just how hard she could fight.

The last thing that she remembered seeing was a jackboot swinging towards her face and then her head snapped back. When she was a little girl, her father taught her all of the names for the stars in three languages. Then, there'd been nothing but bloody tasting darkness.

Her nail-bed throbs and she rolls over, pressing her hand beneath her body and the concrete. She wills it to go numb. Too many things ache. Too many things hurt too much of the time to bear.

Before she came to live in war, there must have been a time when she was entirely without knowledge of such things as pain.  
Maybe not, but it's such a nice thought.

*

Moving, as it turned out, was a hard habit to break. Twice, she managed to escape from them, each time limping a little more than the time before. There had been nowhere to run. It had seemed like there was only a very small corner of the world which was still good and bruised legs couldn’t run fast enough to get her there. They came for her each time. They gave her a piece of paper to sign, a promise that she wouldn't try to escape anymore. When she wouldn't sign it, they put her in chains, on a train, and took her into Germany. They gave her further to run, and nowhere to go. Nacht und Nebel, they called her. Night and Fog. They kept her in silence, chained, completely secret. She might as well have been dead. German is such an ugly language. She sings to herself in English and French and Sanskrit. She works on becoming a true creature of night and fog. She dreams of fading away as the sun rises. 

It's been such a long time in the dark.

*

They throw buckets of cold water over her, to wash away the dried blood, to swill away the shit. By the time she wipes her eyes, there's a blindfold. Before Joe, she had never been naked in front of a man. Now, she barely notices as they strip the wet clothes from her body. She is cold and hard to the touch. She is a woman made out of stone. Only one finger feels anything at all.

On the train, they're chained together, a jingling line of them, shoulders bumping, heads touching, swaying with the rhythm of the train on the tracks, carrying them to God knows where. They don't talk much. Names, only...musical, beautiful names. Yolande. Eliane. Madeleine.

"I was called Madeleine, once," she says, and then she introduces herself as Noor. Nora and the others are already dead. Only one of her left, now. She taps her heel against the boards, mimicking the throb of steel on steel, and one phrase repeats over and over again.

_So sorry, daddy. So, so sorry. So sorry, daddy. So sorry._

When they come to take them from the train there's a moment of confusion and one of the other girls falls against her for a moment. She smells not perfume but the scent of human skin. Clean hair. Her lips brush against skin that tastes salty. Another mouth brushes against her face.

"God bless," whispers the other girl and then she’s roughly dragged away and Noor gags on the scent in the air and wonders what God could possibly have to do with anything anymore?

_Welcome to Dachau_ , says one of the guards, and Noor dimly remembers something that she's heard whispered by women sweeping corridors outside of her cell, the sound coming to her pushed under the heavy door. _Dear God, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come._  Careless talk costs lives. She can't remember the last time she spoke a word.

One small room is very like another. She lies on the cold floor and closes her eyes. She tries to sleep.  
Even her finger doesn't hurt anymore.

*

She hasn’t eaten since they bought her here. Her body reminds her of that. It grumbles and quakes which means that, somewhere deep in her core, she must remember how to still be human. Stones don’t get hungry. Rocks don’t want. She imagines herself as a creature carved out of diamond. Shit washes away and, underneath, pure and clean, the hardest thing in the world. She would love that. They could beat her forever and never chip anything away.

If only.

They wake her with a jackboot to the face. Her head snaps back painfully on her neck. Her father taught her the names for stars, and she tries to keep them in mind. _Maaz, Arcturus, Eltanin, Vulpeculae_. A sole presses across her lips, grinds grit against her teeth and she loses them all, one by one. She tastes blood and mud. She remembers the smell of the air here and wonders how much of the dead is getting into her when she licks her lips and tastes Dachau?

She feels as though she’s already among them.

How long does the beating go on for? She doesn’t know. It all bleeds together after the first few minutes. A diamond is an inevitability of pressure and time. That’s all her body is now: a long record of her own suffering. Blood trickles warmly down her cheek and somebody lifts her head by her hair. Someone asks her if she’s ready. Ready? She’s been ready for this since they first burst in on her. She fought so fiercely because, from that moment on, she’d had nothing to lose. Every breath was just leading her to here.

Two of them lift her. She couldn’t walk under her own power. Her head is spinning crazily. Her head used to spin whenever Joe would bend his head and press a kiss to her lips. His body above her, she tilts her head to catch his eyes, both hands pressed against the hair of his chest.

“I remembered you,” she tells him. “I remembered you until the very end.” This must surely be the very end so she did it. She kept the one promise that she thought she couldn’t make. 

In a courtyard, they let her fall to her knees. She ends up on all fours, but they straighten her up. She feels the snub nose of a Luger against the back of her head. Her eyes roll up, and, for a moment, she sees it. A perfect pocket handkerchief of blue.

Nobody asks her if she has any last words, but she has something for them anyway. She breathes it, and then she smiles and then, nothing, not even the names of stars. 

_Libertié._


End file.
